Controls

The production process in manufacturing has become such a vast expanding sphere that it is impossible for one person, or even a team of people to constantly keep an eye on the different areas at the same time.It is for this reason that industrial controls have been implemented in order to save time, which in turn means to save money.

Industrial control systems (ICS) makes it possible for the factory owner or manager to be at a thousand places at once and being able to effectively control each area individually. Understanding how industrial controls work will give insight to why they are so important in modern day manufacturing.

Different types of industrial controls

As the industry evolved in terms of technology, so did the industrial control system. There are two main industrial controls, both of which will be shortly discussed.Distribution control systems (DCS) are industrial controls that are usually used in plants where oil, gas, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and metals are produced.Its main characteristic is to control a number of different aspects in the plant on a large campus platform, while distributing data at high bandwidth and low latency. Programmable logic controls (PLC) are usually used in factories or areas where there is a need to replace racks of relays in a ladder form. This never used to be a reliable form of control, but over the years technology improved this type of industrial control system, and today it can perform advanced analog controls, as well as controlling I/O racks by means of remote control. This type of industrial control is usually implemented in areas where regular, high-speed binary controls are required, such as a high speed printing press.

A modern type of industrial control is called SCADA, or supervisory control and data acquisition, which is used in areas where there is a need to gather remote data. In these types of areas data is acquired through potentially unreliable low bandwidth and high latency. These systems are implemented by means of RTU systems, which also had its own set of problems in previous years, but technology has improved this type of control system as well.

Network Security Monitoring (NSM)

Network Security Monitoring (NSM) is sometimes implemented to aide industrial control systems in the capturing of data. NSM’s can be advantageous to use due to its passive nature – even with the help of ICS it is still difficult to keep an eye on every single area of the business and NSM systems were created to exert an accurate sense of control. It is also versatile in the sense that it can be implemented in smaller business types as well.

NSM’s are not without challenges and it is important to note these before making the decision to use NSM.Challenges are usually faced in encrypted traffic, large traffic volumes, and privacy concerns. These challenges and threats are easily overcome in ICS as they are rarely encrypted and they operate on low traffic volumes. Its lower bandwidth also contributes to overcoming the challenges owners or managers may face.

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